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Funny. The best harbour when my and a friend used to play this vas Vancouver and the best route Vancouver-Karachi. Always someone paying 5m$ for weapons on that route though bit of change to run into pirates, getting shelled etc. Once..and only ONCE there was a charter that gave a whooping 7m$! We wasn´t able to recreate it though.

I used to play this game for hours and hours! Only Dune II (and later command and conquer!) and Civilization rivaled the time i spent playing
My tip, Start from Houston and sail to Calcutta, buy the best pre owned ship (opening market price $5mil) and buy ships low i.e. keep going to ship broker each day. Then sail to Calcutta and you'll make a minimum of $1.2 mil per transport on average. buy more ships, sell them, and eventually trade ships for a living, your income expenditure graph will steepen. It eventually gets boring, only point of doing this is on 2 player or more game so you can kick behind!

[another_guest]

True, trading ships can make you a huge profit. But it also takes about 1/2 to 1 year before the ship prices have changed from the lowest to the highest level. So in the meantime you better haul some cargo.
Though I must admit that the game gets boring after a while...

[Dark-Star]

I used to play this on Amiga a *lot*. But I never liked the PC version as much as the Amiga version, I don't know why...

Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I prefer playing POC via WinUAE

[Brunzer]

I've played this game al lot back then, liked it a lot. It seems that the only "getting started strategy" posted here is to buy preowned 20000t ship en setting up a standard route with it i.e San Francisco-Capetown. Well, here is mine:
Start in Rotterdam since the fuel there is generally the cheapest.
You start with 4million in cash if take the medium difficulty, this allows you to buy 3 of the smallest low cost ships and fill them up with fuel.
Give each ship a somewhat profitable cargo(Don't take time limit cargo with these ships!) and make sure they all have a different destination port.
Each port you enter manualy gives you 1 status point and every 5 points you get a million dollars bonus. So the point is to visit as many different harbors as possible and invest those dollars in High tec ships, because buying those also gives you status points.
Note: you only get status if you ENTER a harbor, not when you depart from it. And you only get 1 point per harbor, doing the same harbor twice is useless.

It's a nice game, though maneuvering is to easy once you get the hang of it.
The one player option is pretty pointless since the game has no ending but playing with 2 or 3 persons can be fun.

[gumpy]

This game is fun, but the arcade sequences can get annoying.

[hpearson]

this game was fun

i never saw it as a kid but i downloaded from here a while back


i was playing it normally until the part where u have to part the boat
first off i suck HORRIBLY

second i would try to power slide into the side way position docks


it causes so much suspense because there is that ever so slight chance of making it


to me this game is ok fun to park but nothing much besides that but still a thumbs up

[Adenosine]

Looks very interesting.
Does someone know of a freeware alternative to this game?

[another_guest]

Originally Posted by Adenosine

Looks very interesting.
Does someone know of a freeware alternative to this game?

Ocean Trader, available for download here at abandonia
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/553/Ocean+Trader.html

[Fortinbras]

1) Start in Houston or Calcutta and travel back and forth between the two.
2) Buy the best ship you can without a mortgage.
3) Repair the ship as much as you can.
4) Always fill fuel to the max.
5) Sometimes you may want to lay up for some days to get a better offer on cargo and fuel.
6) Repair the ship when it goes below 70 % or so.
7) Don't accept bribes.
8) Always add 12 days to your ships top speed if you accept cargo with a time limit (sometimes it can be worth it even if you get the delay fine though.)
9) Check your office often.
10) If you don't want the hassle of steering by hand when going to port (you can always back out for a $400 000 penalty (well worth it imo).

Of course this is not the only way and probably not the best way to do it, but it's pretty risk free and you will earn money easily. The cargo offers are usually decent every time and once in a while you will get cargo offers well above $4 million. I also always go full speed, don't worry so much about fuel, the faster you can go between the cities, the faster you can make a buck.

Eventually you can buy more/expensive ships, but I don't like to have too many ships, since it will slow down gameplay with all that steering (becomes tedious after a while).